Case Study: Catholic Schools Office – Diocese of Broken Bay achieves 5x traffic capacity and safer BYOD learning with Palo Alto Networks

Increased Network Security Performance Enables Safe, Flexible Learning Environment for Students and Staff

The Catholic Schools Office (Diocese of Broken Bay) administers 44 schools in New South Wales, supporting about 20,000 students and 2,500 staff. Rising traffic volumes and thousands of BYOD devices overwhelmed the legacy firewalls—forcing traffic bypasses, disabling intrusion detection, preventing SSL inspection, and relying on unwieldy per-device proxy content filtering that put students and school operations at risk.

The CSO migrated to the Palo Alto Networks Security Operating Platform (PA-7050, PA-3020, M-100 with Threat Prevention, URL Filtering and Panorama). The cutover was smooth and now the platform inspects ~200 Mbps per school (vs ~20 Mbps previously) with full threat prevention, URL/SSL inspection, App-ID and User-ID. Results include stronger protection against internal and external threats, BYOD support with transparent content filtering, simplified SaaS access and rule management, and reduced security management overhead.

Catholic Schools Broken Bay

Tomas Machacek

IT Network and Security Team Leader